Canadian Science Firsts

Based on Ralph Nader's salute to Canada, the book Canada Firsts coauthored by Duff Conacher and Nadia Milleron.

• 1874 Henry Woodward patented the first incandescent lamp with a light bulb and then sold a share of the patent to Thomas Edison in 1875.
• 1876 Alexander Graham Bell makes the first long distance telephone call.
• 1879 Sir Sandford Fleming invented Standard Time, the idea of dividing the world into 24 time zones. Before that, every town set their clocks differently, designating 12 noon as the time when the sun was directly overhead. Standard time began to be adopted worldwide in 1885 with the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time.
• 1900 Reginald Fessenden transmits the world's first wireless voice message. Fessenden was born in Canada, but the experiment was done in the United States.
• 1901 Guglielmo Marconi receives the first transatlantic wireless message. The message originated in Cornwall, England and was received in St. John's, Newfoundland.
• 1901 Harriet Brooks, first female nuclear physicist becomes first person to discover that one element can turn into another, during her studies of the gas radon.
• 1921 Sir Fredrick Banting and Charles Best discover insulin and make it available worldwide in 1922, relieving millions of people of the symptoms of diabetes.
• 1922 Sir William Stephenson transmits first wireless photographs.
• 1948 First Short Take Off and Landing (STOL) aircraft developed by deHavilland Canada. The Beaver can take off or land in only 600 meters and is still in wide use today. It's successor, the Dash-7 is also still in wide use, worldwide.
• 1951 First cancer radiation therapy: the "Cobalt Bomb" in Ontario and a similar device by Harold Johns in Saskatchewan.
• 1962 Roger Tomlinson develops the world's first Geographic Information System (GIS) the foremost method of mapping relations between humans and the environment.
• 1963 Phil Gold discovers first identifiable cancer tumor antigen and first blood test for cancer is made available in 1970.
• 1969 Willard Boyle invents the first camcorder, the CCD (Charge Coupled Device) which is at the heart of most digital cameras, camcorders, and telescope imaging systems.
• 1972 First domestic geostationary satellite in the world, Anik-1, launched by Telesat Canada to provide national telecommunications, including TV broadcasts.
• 1978 Kenneth Hill discovered "photosensitivity" in light transmitting fibres, a key concept in the field of fibre-optics. Today it is used in "wavelength division multiplexing" to increase the transmission capacity of fibre-optic telecommunication cables.
• 1988 Kelvin Ogilvie first to synthesize RNA the genetic messenger that carries information from DNA to the cell's protein making systems.
• 1995 Launch of Radarsat-1 the most powerful and first commercial synthetic aperture radar Earth observation satellite. Images can be taken through clouds and show objects 10m in size.

If you know of any other Canadian science firsts, please send them to info@science.ca and we will include them on this page.